‘Life After’: Sundance Review

Dir: Reid Davenport. US. 2025. 99mins

Revisiting a landmark right-to-die court case from the 1980s allows filmmaker Reid Davenport to take the long view of attitudes to disability and death. His fascinating documentary Life After uses a number of compelling individual stories to illuminate bigger questions around what has changed and what remains the same. His fresh perspective on good intentions, silenced voices and ethical dilemmas makes a valuable contribution to debates around legalising assisted dying, and should readily secure future exposure on documentary channels and streamers.

The appeal of the film is the way it views things from a different angle

Disabled filmmaker Davenport won a US Documentary directing award at Sundance for his previous feature I Didn’t See You There (2022), and Life After continues his challenge to entrenched attitudes and lazy assumptions. He begins with archive footage from 1983, when US citizen Elizabeth Bouvia sought legal permission to end her life. Paralysed by cerebral palsy and in pain from severe degenerative arthritis, Bouvia did not want to spend her days in a facility and argued that “the quality of my life is over”. The court did not decide in her favour.

Davenport is intrigued by her case and even more so when he reads a Wikipedia entry that suggesting she may still be alive some 40 years later. Discovering what happened to Bouvia is the backbone of a wide-ranging film that presents persuasive evidence on behalf of those with major concerns about expanding assisted dying rights to the disabled community.

Davenport is an engaging figure as he plays detective to track down Bouvia and meets others who have cautionary tales to tell of being disabled and equally concerned about the quality of their lives. He meets Michal, whose mother was his primary carer until her death left him unable to maintain an independent lifestyle. Healthcare will not provide the resources for his needs, leaving him to face a future in a care facility that would feel like “incarceration”. Melissa Hickson talks of her husband Michael who was left with multiple health challenges after a cardiac arrest in 2017; the pressure from the medical authorities was always to “let him go”.  Jerika Bolen had spinal muscular atrophy when she chose to die in 2016 at the age of just 14. Davenport questions whether the community that rallied around her decision may have also been responsible for it. Was she surrounded by people “who thought she’d be better off dead”?

The stories in Life After speak of the pressures to end life, the exorbitant costs of healthcare, doctors who feel they know best and politicians convinced that they are doing the right thing. The appeal of the film is the way it views things from a different angle. Are those seeking to provide an option to end the suffering and pain of the disabled also wanting their removal from society? Is the quality-of-life argument just another way of convincing disabled people that their lives are without worth? Ableist attitudes are hard to counter and independent agency a struggle to achieve.

Elegantly edited by Don Bernier, Life After travels across America and Canada, introducing each new location with lyrical images and a gentle soundtrack from Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe that uses an array of synths, choral music and voices. Davenport does ultimately discover Bouvia’s life story through interviews with her sisters Rebecca and Teresa. It is more complex than he could have imagined, and so much more than if she had been allowed to die in 1983. 

Davenport makes the point that he is not against the provision of assisted dying and claims his film is not about suicide but about people “desperate to find their place in a world that perpetually rejects them”. If we believe in a right to die, Life After asserts that we should also believe in a right to live.